Wireless Week is reporting that the Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) and the Wi-Fi Alliance have joined forces. According to the article, the Wi-Fi Alliance and WiGig Alliance have collaborated for over two years on the WiGig Alliance’s work to develop an interoperability certification for 60GHz products.
Wi-Fi Alliance President and CEO Edgar Figueroa said in a statement that the 60GHz technology has been an important highlight in the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification roadmap for some time. “Combining the expertise of Wi-Fi Alliance and WiGig Alliance will deliver a terrific user experience with 60 GHz solutions, and will help ensure that a full range of interoperable WiGig solutions reach the market as quickly as possible,” Mr. Figueroa said in a statement.
WiGig operates in the unlicensed 60 MHz band and offers short-range multi-gigabit connections with speeds up to 7 Gbps. FierceBroadbandWireless reports that early applications will include ultrabooks and peripherals. WiGig offers short-range multi-gigabit connections for applications ranging from high-definition WiGig Display Extensions (WDE) to peripheral connectivity and I/O cable replacement such as WiGig Serial Extension (WSE), WiGig Bus Extension (WBE), and WiGig SDIO Extension (WDS). Tablets will then include the technology, primarily for media streaming, and smartphones will drive more widespread WiGig adoption from 2015 on according to ABI Research.
Its major limitation is the extremely high 60 GHz frequencies it uses, which limits its connections to near-line-of-sight within a single room. Signals in the 57–64 GHz region are subject to a resonance of the oxygen molecule and are severely attenuated.
Early 60 GHz implementations based on the WiGig specifications are entering the market now, and ABI Research forecasts that by 2016, annual shipments of devices with both Wi-Fi and WiGig technology will reach 1.8 billion units.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.